Montreal, Canada

Montreal is the best night out in Canada and the closest thing North America has to a European city, with the specific unhurried confidence of a place where the party has been running since the sixties. Saint-Laurent is the main strip where the clubs run genuinely late, the Plateau is the terrasse neighbourhood that is pure summer, Crescent Street is the anglophone bar strip, Old Montreal is cobblestones and restaurants, Mile End is the hipster-and-bagel axis, and the Gay Village is one of the largest and most established in the world.

The city's real advantage is bilingualism. Performers switch between French and English mid-sentence as a matter of course, and French dirty talk has a cadence that nobody has ever successfully imitated in English. The Quebecois attitude is also genuinely different from the rest of the country: more relaxed about nudity, less apologetic, more likely to make a joke about your order of fries.

Expect French in the mix, real party energy, and a city where nobody is in a hurry about anything except the dancing.

Nearby: Quebec City Ottawa Toronto Montreal